China Tiger: Claire Lee Chennault, 1893-1958

"Boy, if the Chinese only had 100 good pursuit planes and 100
fair pilots, they'd exterminate the Jap air force!"

That boast -- made in September 1937 by Claire Lee
Chennault -- turned out to be a prescription for the American
Volunteer Group he would bring to Asia in the summer of 1941, to
win immortality as the "Flying Tigers" of Burma and China.

Japan's aggression on the mainland of Asia had begun more
than forty years before. First Korea, then Taiwan, and finally
Manchuria -- China's five northeastern provinces, beyond the
Great Wall -- came under the blood-red banner of the Rising Sun.
China did little to resist, with her cities garrisoned by
foreigners and her villages ruled by competing warlords. Only
one man seemed able to unify this helpless giant: a stubborn,
vain, vindictive, shaven-skulled officer named Chiang Kai-shek.
He had served in the Japanese field artillery and studied in
Soviet Russia, but his dominant trait was fear and suspicion of
everything foreign.

Chiang made an exception for Claire Chennault from
Waterproof, Louisiana. Recruited with other American as an
instructor and adviser for the Chinese Air Force, Chennault was
forty-four when Japanese marines landed at Shanghai in September
1937. (He was born September 6, 1893, three years after the
birthdate generally ascribed to him.) He seemed a generation
older, his faced seamed and his hearing dimmed from years of
flying open-cockpit fighter planes, and his lungs wracked by
bronchitis -- the penalty for a two-pack-a-day addiction to Camel
cigarettes. The U.S. Army had forced him to retire, supposedly
because of his health, but more likely because of his gadfly
insistence -- against the wisdom of the time -- that fighter
planes could destroy incoming bombers before they reached their
target.

Though only a captain in the army reserve, who had never
served at a rank higher than major, Chennault in China gave
himself the honorific of "colonel." He became a favorite of
Chiang Kai-shek's Wellesley-educated wife, the beautiful, clever
and unscrupulous Soong Mei-ling. And Chennault was captivated by
Madame Chiang, "who will hereafter be 'The Princess' to me," as
he pledged in his diary.

Chennault's theory of "defensive pursuit" was quickly
proved in the air over Hangzhou and Nanjing, as Chinese fighter
pilots cut a murderous swath through unescorted enemy bomber
squadrons. As Chiang's chief of staff for air, Chennault could
call upon a small cadre of Americans who knew and loved him from
their service in the U.S. Army Air Corps -- most notably, "Luke"
Williamson and Billy McDonald. They had been Chennault's wingmen
in the Flying Trapeze, an army precision-flying team that
prefigured the Thunderbirds of today.

Unfortunately for the Chinese fighter pilots, the
Japanese navy soon brought in Mitsubishi A5Ms, open-cockpit
monoplanes with fixed landing gear and two rifle-caliber
machineguns. The Japanese fighters were faster and more agile
than the American-built biplanes flown by the Chinese. Defeated
in the air and on the ground, Chiang's government retreated 2,000
miles up the Yangzi River to Chongqing in the western mountains.

Though he could do little about improving China's
aircraft, Chennault did experiment with hiring "fair pilots" from
abroad. The mercenaries proved more formidable as boasters and
boozers than they were at fighting, and the 14th Volunteer
Squadron was disbanded after a few comic-opera missions. There
was talk that Chennault and some of the other American
instructors -- Billy McDonald especially -- also flew as
mercenaries for the Chinese Air Force, earning $500 and $1,000
for each plane they shot down, but apparently it was only talk.

In 1938 Chennault was sent to Kunming in the province of
Yunnan, his assignment to train a new generation of Chinese
fighter pilots. War supplies continued to trickle in through
French Indochina (Vietnam) on the south and British Burma on the
west, but never in sufficient quantity. In the summer of 1940,
by which time his capital had earned the unhappy title of "most-
bombed city in the world," Chiang sent T. V. Soong -- Madame's
brother -- to Washington in search of American aid. Chennault
went along as Soong's air adviser.

Thus did China obtain "100 good pursuit planes" --
Curtiss fighters of a type known to the U.S. Army as the P-40C
and to the British Royal Air Force (for whom they had been
intended) as the Tomahawk II. The "100 fair pilots" were
recruited from the U.S. armed services for a starting salary of
$600 a month plus $500 for each Japanese plane destroyed. Two
hundred technicians were also required. The army and navy,
already preparing for war with Germany, threw obstacles in the
way of China's recruiters, and it was November 1941 before the
last contingent reached Burma, where Chennault had obtained the
loan of an RAF base near the town of Toungoo.

Some of the recruits had never flown anything hotter than
a basic trainer. Others joined the American Volunteer Group with
the apparent intention of quitting at the first opportunity, so
they could take civilian airline jobs. Between accidents and
resignations, the AVG never reached the strength that had been
planned for it. In the first week of December, Chennault counted
just sixty-two Tomahawks on the flight line at Toungoo, with
about the same number of pilots qualified to fly them.

Hot War

President Roosevelt had authorized a 500-plane air force
for China: the Tomahawk group already training in Burma, another
to be equipped with Republic P-43 Lancers and Vultee P-66
Vanguards, and a bomber group equipped with Lockheed A-28 Hudsons
that could reach the Japanese home islands. In addition, the
British had promised a Buffalo fighter squadron and perhaps a
squadron of Blenheim bombers. Some of the American planes and
ground crews were already at sea when Japan closed out
Roosevelt's plan by attacking U.S., British, and Dutch possession
on December 8, 1941 (December 7 in Hawaii, east of the
international date line). With no reinforcements in sight, the
three understrength, half-trained squadrons at Toungoo would have
to defend the entire length of the "Burma Road," 2,000 miles from
Rangoon to Chongqing, by river barge, railway car, and truck,
over 10,000-foot mountains and mile-deep gorges.

To safeguard them from a surprise attack, Chennault moved
his 1st and 2nd squadrons back to Kunming, and it was near that
highland city that the AVG was blooded on December 20, 1941.
Like the admirals at Shanghai, Japanese generals sent ten twin-
engined Kawasaki bombers winging northward from Hanoi, French
Indochina -- without fighter escort. The AVG shot down three or
four bombers and killed at least fifteen army airmen, at the cost
of one Tomahawk crash-landed when it ran out of gas. It was the
first Allied victory of the Pacific War, and very nearly the
first defeat ever suffered by a Japanese military unit.

Alone of U.S. publications, Time magazine
recognized the importance of that fateful skirmish over the dun-
colored mountains of Yunnan province. In its issue of December
27, 1941, the popular newsweekly celebrated Chennault's mercenary
pilots as "Flying Tigers" -- a name that was coined by China's
military-aid office in Washington.